Plug & Play Robot Car Brain

Eric Gray owns an insurance company in the New Orleans area. When he read about the first DARPA Grand Challenge in 2004, the idea of a robot car race got him so fired up he talked his brother and co-owner into fielding their very own company team in the next race.

"Impossible," Gray Insurance IT chief Paul Trepagnier said when the brothers told him they wanted him to head the programming effort for the robo-car. None of them had any experience in robotics. Still, the IT department was just coming off a programming project for their clients, and they had some down time.

Six months later, the team’s roboticized Ford hybrid, named Kat-5 after the Hurricane that had ravaged their hometown only a couple of months before the race, became one of just four teams to cross the finish line within the allotted 10 hours.

Now Team Gray is back with Plan B, a Ford hybrid so named because the team didn’t win the $1 million in development money DARPA gave to eleven other teams competing in this year’s race.

The team’s plan B is to go commercial with the Autonomous Vehicle System, a plug & play solution aimed at automakers who don’t want to subject drivers to the grueling endurance tests they put new model cars through.

Plan B made some nice turns on the left-turn-and-merge track this morning, but didn’t wait for the other cars to pass before rolling right out into traffic. Not a problem for a lone car on an auto company test track, but somewhat more problematic in an urban environment….

Like the other teams, Team Gray is tweaking code during every available minute to exterminate bugs that show up in these qualifying tests. They’ll be out early tomorrow morning on the four-way-stop-and-routing-around-an-obstacle track that clobbered Team Jefferson yesterday.